Pms vs. Programmers (This week in pmclinic)
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum– PMs vs. Programmers:
Welcome to April (If you’re in the USA, time to get your taxes done).Here’s this week’s situation: The raging debate in my corner of the world is PMs vs. programmers. Our management just agreed to hire another two PMs for our organization, instead of hiring another two programmers.
Most of us (the other programmers) think it’s a mistake: our biggest needs are team bandwidth and productivity, not planning, client management or crisis management. We’re afraid of the ratio of PM to programmers spiraling us down into unproductive misery. Most of the PMs around here are non-technical and can’t help much in technical decision making.
Two part question:
- How do you know the right ratio of PMs to programmers for a team?
- What level of technical skill should PMs have? CS degree? former programmer? C++ for dummies? Or none at all?
It also depends on the definition of a PM. If it’s a Team Leader with programming skills, then do not worry. If it’s a pure-bred PM (as in Manager), then perhaps it’s time to worry. Any Team Leader must have real-life experience for a number of years, but not exclusively in programming. I find the best team leaders to have a diverse but real background in management (20%), programming (40%), user-centred design (15%) and some-arbitrary-wildly-unrelated-thing (15%). Roughly.
As to the secret formulae; if you can’t feed your team with two pizzas, you’ve got too many. And my preferred success-ratio is 1 Team Leader for every 4 programmers. (A lot of people thinks that numbers in people up the output performance of the team, which is a huge fallacy which I feel everyone must fight on every level; get good people, not more people.)
“What level of technical skill should PMs have? CS degree? former programmer? C++ for dummies? Or none at all?”
IMO it depends of the programming team structure and the definition of PM as Alex says. If in the coding team there is a real “senior” programmer, which by definition has application modelling skills, he can take the role of managing the project on the programming level – assign tasks to junior coders, coordinate the development process.
If there is a nonprogramming PM above him (f.ex. he coordinates the whole programming, webdesign, ad-campaign process), they meet the requirements with timeline together, exchange information during development process, etc. That can work fine.
When the non-programmer PM is the main coordinator of a group of coders/designers, failing the deadline (or working on an impossible timeline affecting the quality) is very possible. Sad, but based on experience as part of such team a few years ago.